gating Jtatnraltsi: 



A Penny Weekly Magazine of Natural History. 



No. 61. JANUARY 15th, 1881. Vol. 2. 



NOTES & OBSERVATIONS. 



LAST week we attempted to give our 

 young readers some slight idea 

 of the various cases under which the y 

 should send their captures for publica- 

 tion. We propose to-day to say a few 

 words on a similar subject, and one, 

 perhaps, of greater importance. In 

 No. G2, p. 69, Mr. Grcgson quoted Mr. 

 Stainton, who said " he preferred 

 hearing a fact twenty times to never 

 hearing it and we would begin our 

 remarks by directing special attention 

 to that statement. We might almost 

 take it as a text and enlarge upon it in 

 proper fashion, divide the subject into 

 heads, and wind up with the application. 

 There is so much more in the sentence 

 than appears, perhaps more than was 

 intended, to be conveyed. It seems to 

 mean that it is better to be bored by 

 being told something you know than to 

 be kept in ignorance by being supposed 

 to know and not being told at all, and 

 in relation to a certain class of facts 

 this is all it can mean. To be told 

 that a rare butterfly occurs at a certain 

 place includes the whole matter, and to 

 be told twenty times gives no more 

 information than to be told once. We 



hear that a plant we want for our 

 herbarium blooms in a certain lane, or 

 moor, or hill, and hearing it once tells 

 us all we want to know. With facts of 

 this class repetition of the information 

 adds nothing to our knowledge, and 

 though we prefer hearing it twenty 

 times to not hearing it, the nineteen 

 times are only repetitions of what we 

 already knew. But there is another 

 class of facts in which we learn from 

 their constant recurrence something we 

 could not learn from hearing the state- 

 ment once. A person who knows 

 nothing of Entomology finds a chrys- 

 alis fastened by the tail, and with a belt 

 of silk round the body ; it produces a 

 white butterfly, such as he had seen 

 about the cabbages of his garden. He 

 finds another fastened by the tail only, 

 that produces the beautiful insect he 

 has heard called the " Peacock." 

 Interested in the matter he searches 

 for more chrysalides the next season, 

 and finds that he gets two different 

 butterflies from those with a silk belt 

 round them, and which he always finds 

 near his cabbage, but they are both 

 "whites ;" he never finds a "Peacock," 

 nor a " Tortoise shell," under such 

 circumstances. These he finds near or 



